Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012) was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in St. Louis, MO. After receiving a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York City. There she founded some of the first—and foremost—radical feminist organizations in the United States. In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, she published The Dialectic of Sex, one of the most widely discussed books of the second-wave feminist movement. Semiotext(e) published Airless Spaces, her second book, in 1998.